We live in an ever-changing world. Sometimes, that change is for good. Social justice, the democratization of information, and the ability to never get lost again with GPS are all positive changes.
A constant stream of media and a culture that supports conspicuous consumption both add needless complexity to life. Paskho is here to offer a remedy to this with a recipe for simple living. When you take away the needless, extraneous things holding you down, you leave space for the things that matter at the end of the day.
Below, we have six simple ways that you can simplify your life. Best of all, each of these are easy to perform.
Read on for life-simplifying tips that you can begin in mere minutes.
1: Develop Habits
One of the most powerful ways to enhance your daily life is by developing habits. Most things we do that we aren’t intimately familiar with will take a degree of planning. Habits allow us to do them without this slight mental process, freeing our energy up for other things.
Habits take a while to form, and that time can be anywhere from a few weeks to 254 days. Once a habit is actually formed, it becomes something you do on autopilot. Whether it’s knowing exactly the best route for your commute or your perfect morning routine, you may follow it unintentionally.
We naturally follow habits, regardless of whether or not we consciously form them. If we don’t put the effort in, we’re liable to fall into doing what’s easy rather than what’s good. Habits are hard to form at the start, as we change existing behavior patterns, but they become easier over time.
Your daily habits start with your morning routine. The choice of a soft, ambient alarm versus a harsh, jarring one sets the tone for your day. From there, you immediately have dozens of choices you have to make. You choose whether to shower, what kind of skincare to use, what kind of breakfast to have, and more.
The only reliable way to make these choices consistently, when you are only half-conscious, is through forming habits. The same goes for your evening routine when you’re tired from the day.
To make forming habits easier, take action to make performing your daily routine easier. If you want to be more consistent with skincare, set out your toiletries in an orderly manner. If you want to reduce time spent picking an outfit, set out clothes the night before, or simplify your wardrobe.
2: Declutter Your Existence
Accumulation comes naturally to most people. We want to be secure, and we want to hold reverence for the past. We also want to explore new things. There are two key ways we accumulate: new experiences and new things.
Consumerism and ads on everything from television to public spaces to phones beckon us to buy “more.” Targeted ads based on the things we say and do make it more likely you’ll be interested in buying. The key to simplifying your life is to buy less stuff that takes up space.
There are plenty of ways to downsize your things. The first is to get rid of everything you’ve emotionally outgrown. Decor, clothing, and more that you’ve kept in storage and never see yourself using or wearing again need to go. This way, you can make room for new memories.
When it comes to clothing, quality and versatility beat quantity of garments. Paskho takes a minimalist approach, with high-quality performance fabric and elegant, understated designs. The goal is to have one garment do the work of several, reducing clutter in your wardrobe. This makes it easier to choose what to wear and focus on other things that matter.
It can be hard to let go of things, especially to begin the process. Once you begin, it can be freeing to no longer be tied to your collection of personal possessions.
3: Reduce White Noise From Media
Escaping from screens is nearly impossible. Electronics are now a staple of how we work, relax, and even read and gather information. No set of sources produces as much data as the vast wave of social media. Even worse, “suggested” posts make it so you can spend hours browsing new content without ever reaching completion.
How much of that really matters to you? The more time we spend exploring digital spaces with no set goal, the less time we have overall. The same applies to spending even just ten minutes before deciding what to watch. That is time you will never get back.
The solution, of course, is to eliminate or reduce the influences of media you aren’t invested in. Delete the nonessential apps you may accumulate, and unsubscribe to feeds you don’t care about. If you want media to positively change your life, consider listening to podcasts. These can educate and inform you in ways you like, whether in your free time or on your commute.
4: Practice Healthy Mental Habits
Simplifying your life is about more than just reducing the load of items around you. It requires bringing peace to your inner life. We must pay attention to all areas of our life, and not just the physical aspects.
Thousands of years of philosophy and self-care contain essential lessons to help us live better lives. The Ancient Greek philosophy of Stoicism has as its ultimate goal rationality and inner peace. This comes from many things, but above others is the understanding that one only has ultimate control over one’s values.
You can’t control everything in your life, so let it go. Negative thoughts about things outside your control won’t be able to help you. Instead, it’s healthier to focus your energies where you can affect real change.
Mindfulness
That is where mindfulness can help. Mindfulness encourages us to be aware of our limits but also simply aware of ourselves. Many mindfulness exercises exist and primarily focus on being intently and acutely aware of our body and senses. The way food tastes, how our posture feels, and more all have a place in mindfulness.
This practice encourages us to be aware of our mental processes and ideally helps us to reduce mental clutter. Mindfulness isn’t about sublimating negative thoughts. All that does is hide them without addressing their source. Instead, the method allows us to feel them, and hopefully, by acknowledging negative thoughts, we can understand their cause and origin.
Though it has its roots in Buddhism, there are academic studies supporting its health benefits. In addition to improving a variety of mental health conditions, it can alleviate blood pressure and stress issues. With only minimal time needed daily, it is one of the simplest ways to realize what is listed here.
5: Make Plans
Habits help us automate essential everyday activities. However, much in our lives is too infrequent to be done as a habit. New recipes, new locations, and new adventures all demand our active attention as we engage in them. Planning ahead is a simple way to simplify complex plans.
Making plans, lists, and more gives you goals and a concrete plan of action. When going grocery shopping, if you have only vague plans, you may get too little or too much food. A concrete list here can make all the difference and make your trip more expedient.
Continuing the food metaphor, meal planning can also help save time and money. Preparing batches of meals to last a week or only a few days saves the time needed cooking every day. Just going a little out of your way in the moment can prepare you better for the future.
Imagine the difference if you didn’t just limit your plans to the immediate future. By mapping out larger plans for work or creative endeavors, you can create incredible change in your life. You may have a hobby or passion you never followed and wonder where you’d be if you’d focused on it.
Making plans allows you to organize the ways in which you dedicate your energies and enables you to do more. A renewed passion, intentional growth, or new language can be within reach with a plan of action.
6: Take Your Time
Our next tip is one of kindness, among a variety of action-oriented tips. If you attempt to institute all these changes at once, you’ll most likely get burnt out. It’s better to make small changes that stick rather than attempt to introduce a variety of drastic changes that don’t hold.
Small changes add up and create a huge difference over time. We spend years building up our lives and can’t expect radical change to happen in mere days. Feel free to slow down, and not just when it comes to adopting new change.
We live in a productivity-obsessed culture. Doing more, faster, and doing multiple things at once is incentivized, and the notion of “the grind” is romanticized. In truth, multi-tasking can ruin your productivity.
When you single-task, your attention is focused on one thing. Multitasking prevents you from going deep into any subject, giving you a shallow level of attention to your task. This can be poor for your work day when demands of skill are often high. It can also increase your impulsiveness and willingness to take unnecessary risks.
Last Tip: Use Simplicity To Tackle the Hard Things
The above six tips offer a starting point to a simple life. All that remains is to put them into action.
“Simple” sounds good, but why do we want to simplify things in the first place? A lot of things are complex — and should rightfully be. History, art, and the search for self-improvement are all complex, multifaceted pursuits that demand rigor. Simplicity, too, demands rigor, but in a different way.
Simplicity streamlines life so that the complex can be faced with grace and ease. Minimalism can come in many forms, including philosophy, design, and fashion. Paskho is dedicated to providing minimalist apparel for men and women who need versatile travel clothing. Behind the subtlety of our style lies a complex social mission.
The fashion industry, for the essential garments it provides us, has its own major faults. It pollutes the environment more than nearly any other industry and makes all of us morally complicit. To counteract this issue, designers look to revolutionize the fashion world into a more sustainable and conscientious sphere.
Paskho embraces and forwards ethical, sustainable fashion in a few key ways. We use mostly vegan fabrics, and when we can’t use vegan fabrics, we utilize ethically-sourced wool.
We try to source our products in locations that give jobs to people who need them most. The system that brings Paskho clothing to life is a complex one, but one that is devoted to simplicity.
Sources:
Benefits of Mindfulness I HelpGuide.org
